


She Is the Strangest Girl

by ProtoNeoRomantic



Series: Patch Works [18]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Books, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Gender or Sex Swap, Insecurity, Insomnia, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-07
Updated: 2014-03-07
Packaged: 2018-01-14 21:50:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1280059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/ProtoNeoRomantic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Giles Checks out Willow's bookshelves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She Is the Strangest Girl

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Who Do You Think You Are?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1235281) by [ProtoNeoRomantic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/ProtoNeoRomantic). 



Giles lay on his back, wide awake, staring at Willow’s ceiling, listening to Buffy’s deep, even breathing, watching her breast rise and fall in Willow’s pink night shirt, waiting for dawn to creep over the surface of the Earth. He couldn’t sleep. There were too many important variables that he had no control over. There was too much hanging in the balance.

If he had been in his own home, he might have been tempted to get up and fix himself a drink to settle his nerves, but he was not. Though everyone had agreed that sleep was what they all needed most, Willow seemed in no state to be left alone, and it certainly didn’t seem right to leave Sheila alone in the state _she_ was in. It was probably for the best, Giles decided. He had a sneaking suspicion his nerves were getting entirely too used to being settled with a drink lately. Too much reliance on the philosophy of Brother Malt could easily become a bit unseemly for... he chuckled to himself... a family man.

He thought of the Chariot card from the Tarot, the horses rushing in different directions. A symbol of duality, inconsistency, chaos. He was not interested in chaos. He had had his fill of it long ago. But then, those two horses also represented reason and passion, the two motive forces of the human spirit, the team that together made life livable and worth living. The trick, of course was to get them to pull together.

He got up and clicked on a bedside lamp, glancing through Willow’s book shelves in the dim light to see what there was to read. Edgar Allen Poe, of course; not tonight thanks. Harlan Ellison, ‘Deathbird,’ no less. Fractured fairy tales and Grimm’s splintery originals rubbed up against a big gold leafed volumes of the other kind. He chuckled dryly to himself when he spotted the collected works of Emily Dickenson. Somehow he though not. He’d been reminded enough of the dead piled at his and Buffy’s feet for one night.

Steven King. Steven Hawking. Jack Vance. Jack London. Percy Shelly, Mary Shelly, Mary Wollstonecraft. H.P. Lovecraft. ‘Decent of Man’ shelved next to ‘Inherit the Wind’ next to a Novelization of ‘Star Wars’ next to a full color comic book of the works of Sigmund Freud. ‘Little Women.’ ‘Little Men.’ Anne McAffery. Kurt Vonegunt. Edgar Rice Burroughs. Joseph Conrad. Judy Bloom. Sun Tzu. Madeline L’Engle. ‘Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book?’ Maybe he wasn’t marrying the strangest girl at Sunnydale High after all.

A very new looking hardcover on the mysteries of human sexuality lay on top of the bookcase, place-marked halfway through with a credit card receipt. Sensible girl. If you don’t understand something, read about it. It almost worked with sex, up to a point. A map and a compass for babes in the woods. How extraordinarily odd to think of Willow, of all people, having sex with a woman as a man. What he felt was not nearly so simple as disgust, nor to be honest, quite as wholly negative. But it left him feeling uneasy in his state of ignorance as to when the sheets had last been changed.

 


End file.
